Akamai

Akamai, the Cambridge Massachusetts content delivery network and network services provider, announced they had laid off 400 people in their earnings call with analysts yesterday.
On the call, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton indicated that the 400 people represented 5 percent of the company’s 8000 worldwide workforce. “As part of our effort to improve operational efficiency, we reduced… Read More

As content delivery networks (CDN) market leaders grapple with technological shifts, some innovators are making rapid advances. The CDN market, estimated at $5 billion today, is anticipated to be more than $10 billion by 2019. While the market is growing rapidly, can the giants learn to dance? How are the startups aiming slingshots at the legacy Goliaths? Read More

Though some cried while others cheered, both sides tuned into to watch President Trump’s inauguration in sizable numbers – record-breaking numbers, in fact. The event has broken new ground, becoming the largest, single live news event that content delivery network Akamai has ever hosted, the company says, following an analysis of its live video data.
According to Akamai, live… Read More

Consolidation continues to work its way through the world of enterprise startups. Today Akamai announced that it has acquired Soha Systems in an all-cash deal. Soha provides enterprise secure access as a service.
Akamai is not disclosing the value of the deal, saying it was immaterial for the company. The news comes less than a week after Akamai announced that it acquired an… Read More

Akamai released its quarterly State of the Internet reports today, one detailing quality of access and the other attacks on companies and infrastructure. The slow march continues towards a better and faster internet for everyone — and that includes hackers. Read More

CDN network Akamai today published its quarterly “State of the Internet” report for the first quarter of 2016. The report examines global internet speeds, which are going to be more relevant than ever for live-sports aficionados in the summer of the Rio Olympic Games.
Global average connection speed increased 12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015, to 6.3 Mbps, a 23… Read More

Akamai released a new Bot Manager tool today designed to give companies finely tuned control over Bot traffic on their websites.
The numbers vary, but research has shown that about half of traffic on the web comes from bots. Bots are small programs that interact with a website and can be used for good or ill, depending on your perspective, says Renny Shen, senior marketing manager for the… Read More

The holiday season e-commerce rush is in full swing, and so are malicious hackers that will hope to profit from the increased activity online. Timely news, then, that Akamai, the specialist in optimising web site performance and content distribution, is making a big acquisition to beef up its security offerings: it is buying Prolexic, a U.S.-based provider of cloud-based security solutions… Read More

The ITU has recently published figures noting 2.7 billion internet connections globally, and today Akamai has released some numbers pointing to how fast those connections actually are. The company, a specialist in traffic optimization, says that we have now reached a tipping point of sorts: half of all connections made to its network are currently running at 4Mbps or higher — a sign… Read More

Akamai has today released its Q1 State of the Internet report detailing the latest figures in online and mobile usage and current security threats. The topline figure is that our connected world is getting more connected. There are now nearly 734 million addresses in use worldwide, the company says. Akamai estimates that this works out to over 1 billion users because of device sharing. Read More

Fastly has raised $10 million in a Series B round for its SSD-powered content delivery network (CDN) used by the likes of Disqus, Twitter and GitHub. The round was led by August Capital.
Fastly, founded by Artur Bergman, the former CTO of Wikia, uses a patent-pending fast-caching engine that delivers content at what the company says is the fastest recorded time to first byte. Fastly… Read More

Globally, the speed for broadband connections is steadily on the rise: according to Akamai’s Q1 2012 State of the Internet report, it’s now at 2.6Mbps, compared to 2.3Mbps in the last quarter, and a rise of 25% on a year ago and a reversal of the 14% decline of last quarter. South Korea continues to remain the connection king, with an average connection speed of 15.7Mbps. The U.S. Read More

After scooping up rival Cotendo for $268 million recently, content delivery and web services giant Akamai is making another acquisition today—Blaze Software. Blaze’s technology helps accelerate speed of Websites, and optimizes load times while cutting bandwidth costs. Financial details of the dealn were not disclosed except that it was an all-cash transaction.
As Akamai… Read More

Classify this as a rumor for now, but Israeli business press is reporting that Akamai is poised to take over one of its competitors, website and mobile acceleration technology vendor Cotendo, for $300 million to $350 million. Founded in 2008, Cotendo has raised over $36 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Tenaya Capital.
A few months ago, Cotendo… Read More

Videos on the iPad and other tablets look great, and increasingly apps are being created specifically for watching videos on tablets. There is just one problem: they cannot be found by search. This problem is true for information in all apps in general, but it is particularly one for video.
A couple weeks ago, I moderated a panel at Beet.TV’s Video Strategy Summit where this topic came up. Read More

Content delivery and web services giant Akamai has acquired mobile web development company Velocitude a mobile services platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Velocitude helps companies with mobile web development in commerce and marketing applications. The startup’s technology helps deliver mobile content to websites in a variety of devices. The Velocitude Mobile Platform allows… Read More

One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students, Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what… Read More

Initial reports said that hundreds of thousands of people watched YouTube’s Live U2 concert on Sunday night. Then reports yesterday raised the estimate to 2.5 million. Double that, and then double it again. 10 million is the real number of live streams that YouTube did that night, according to Variety.
That’s massive, and it’s obviously the biggest live streaming event… Read More

Speculation was rampant the last few weeks that Google had to rely on a third party content delivery network to make the YouTube Live live concert stream properly at scale. Despite the fact that Google has it’s own quite impressive CDN, streaming live video (as opposed to progressive downloads, which YouTube has historically relied on) is hard stuff. And expensive – you have to… Read More